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In a Changing Myanmar, Vows of Support From a Visiting President
For Obama and Clinton, Their Final Tour as Partners
(about 5 hours later)
YANGON, Myanmar — President Obama journeyed to this storied tropical outpost of jade and jungles on Monday to “extend the hand of friendship” as a land long tormented by repression and poverty begins to throw off military rule and emerge from decades of isolation.
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — They emerged from Air Force One together, side by side, smiling at the crowd waiting on the tarmac below. Then as they headed down the stairs, she held back just a little so that she would stay a step behind him.
Mr. Obama arrived here as the first sitting American president to visit Myanmar with the hope of solidifying the stunning changes that have transformed this Southeast Asian country and encouraging additional progress toward a more democratic system. With the promise of more financial assistance, Mr. Obama vowed to “support you every step of the way.”
For President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, this week’s trip to Southeast Asia is to be their last foreign adventure together in office, an intriguing, sometimes awkward closing road show that is nostalgic over a partnership at an end yet hints at a future ripe with possibility.
The president was greeted on a mild, muggy day by tens of thousands of people lining the road from the airport — and by further promises of reform by the government, which announced a series of specific commitments regarding the release of political prisoners and the end of ethnic violence. Although Mr. Obama stayed just six hours, his visit was seen here as a validation of a new era.
Four years after their cage-match battle for the presidency, the rivals-turned-allies proved a more compatible team than either might have imagined when Mrs. Clinton first accepted his invitation to join the cabinet. While not exactly close friends, they developed a working relationship of respect, one in which Mr. Obama gave her the freedom to roam the world while she strategically deferred to him in ways small and large as she carried out his policies and shaped her own.
He met at the government headquarters with President Thein Sein, who has ushered in change, and then made a personal pilgrimage to the home of the opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, where she was confined for most of two decades before her release from house arrest two years ago. Overlooking the manicured lawn and well-tended garden outside the elegant two-story lakeside house, the president celebrated the Nobel-winning dissident as an “icon of democracy” who inspired the world, then kissed and embraced her.
Mrs. Clinton’s signature initiative as America’s top diplomat is what has become known as the administration’s “pivot to Asia,” a strengthening of United States strategic, security and economic ties in the Asia-Pacific region. It is a policy Mr. Obama advanced with his three-country trip that began Saturday and included two nations never before visited by an American president, Myanmar and Cambodia.
Still, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, who according to human rights activists privately counseled Americans against Mr. Obama’s making the trip out of concern that it was premature, sounded a note of caution. “The most difficult time in any transition is when we think that success is in sight,” she warned. “Then we have to be very careful that we are not lured by a mirage of success.”
Now as the president prepares to begin his second term, the secretary is stepping down, bone weary, according to aides, and ready for an extended rest after nearly a million miles of globe-trotting. She has waxed about the days not far off when she can relax, read a book and even travel just for pleasure. But many on Air Force One these last few days, not least the president himself, expect her to be back after a rest, making a bid to succeed him in 2016 and redefining their relationship once again.
While local leaders attribute the changes so far to internal factors and decisions far removed from policies set in Washington, Mr. Obama was eager to claim a measure of credit and drank in the adulation of the crowd. Outside the gates of Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s home, thousands of people gathered, chanting, “Obama, Obama!” and crowding his motorcade as it passed.
Mr. Obama as much as anyone has taken note that this will be their last trip together and made a point of praising Mrs. Clinton publicly as they have jetted across Southeast Asia. They met up in Thailand and then traveled together on Monday to Myanmar and finally here to Cambodia. Along the way, they teamed up to meet with premiers and potentates, tour an ancient golden pagoda and chat with a Buddhist monk about budget deficits and maybe even presidential politics.
Mr. Obama has tried to play nursemaid to the opening of Myanmar, formerly and still known by many as Burma, by sending the first American ambassador in 22 years, easing sanctions and meeting with Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi at the White House. On Monday, he announced the return of the United States Agency for International Development along with $170 million for projects over the next two years.
On the porch of the house of Myanmar’s opposition leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Mr. Obama gave Mrs. Clinton a shout-out.
In a small gesture during his meeting with Mr. Thein Sein, Mr. Obama even called the country Myanmar, the term favored by the generals who renamed it, even though the United States government officially prefers Burma. The president noted that in his inaugural address in 2009 he had vowed to reach out to those “willing to unclench your fist” and hailed Myanmar for responding.
“Where did Hillary go?” he suddenly asked as he interrupted his remarks about Myanmar’s transition from military rule. “Where is she?”
“So today, I have come to keep my promise and extend the hand of friendship,” Mr. Obama said in a speech at the University of Yangon. He promised to “help rebuild an economy” and develop new institutions that can be sustained.
She caught his attention from the audience. “There she is,” he said to applause.
“The flickers of progress that we have seen must not be extinguished — they must be strengthened, they must become a shining north star for all this nation’s people,” he said.
“I could not be more grateful,” he went on, “not only for your service, Hillary, but also for the powerful message that you and Aung San Suu Kyi send about the importance of women — and men — everywhere embracing and promoting democratic values and human rights.”
Although human rights activists criticized him for visiting while hundreds of political prisoners remain locked up and violence rages through parts of the country, Mr. Obama used the occasion to nudge Myanmar to move further. He noted that democracy is about constraints on power, pointing to his own limits as president.
Mrs. Clinton, as is her style, has kept publicly quiet during the trip, leaving the president the stage while she has largely remained behind the scenes or in the audience. When the two arrived at Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s house, she hung back while Mr. Obama emerged from the limousine to be greeted.
“That is how you must reach for the future you deserve, a future where a single prisoner of conscience is one too many,” he said at the university. “You need to reach for a future where the law is stronger than any single leader.”
And yet at times, her deeper experience in remote places around the world like this is palpable. After Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi shook Mr. Obama’s hand and began to draw him inside the house, she abruptly stopped as if remembering, turned around to look for Mrs. Clinton and then rushed over to give her a warm embrace. While Mrs. Clinton was seen as an old friend, Mr. Obama later appeared to mispronounce Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s name; she flinched but later hugged him.
The audience of 1,500, with Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi seated next to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in the front row, listened attentively but quietly. It interrupted with applause at just two points, once when Mr. Obama said that “no process of reform will succeed without national reconciliation” and again when he talked of the duties of being a citizen.
Likewise, when Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton paid a courtesy call on the hospitalized King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand, the secretary held back while the president advanced. “Your Majesty,” Mr. Obama said as he grasped the king’s hand. “It’s a great honor.”
The choice of venue for his centerpiece speech spoke to the incomplete nature of change here. The university once was the engine of protest, fueling uprisings by students, including one in 1988 that was put down violently by the military and opened the modern era of repression.
Only then did Mrs. Clinton approach, but again with much greater familiarity. “Hello again,” she said. “It’s so good to see you again. And my husband sends you his very best regards.”
In recent years, the university has fallen into disrepair, its campus largely empty except for graduate students and the building where Mr. Obama spoke decaying and blackened on the outside. In recent days, the government scrambled to spruce up the campus before Mr. Obama’s arrival, leaving him to speak in a repainted hall addressing a university that is not functioning in any real way.
The king handed Mr. Obama some gifts, including a red box. “This is beautiful,” the president responded looking at a gift inside that could not be seen by reporters. “Thank you so much. This is lovely.”
Still, change has come more quickly than anyone imagined. Under Mr. Thein Sein, a former general, many political prisoners have been released and media restrictions have been eased. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy, was allowed to run in elections and she won a seat in Parliament. Even before Air Force One landed here, Mr. Thein Sein offered a further gesture.
Then an American woman next to Mrs. Clinton indicated that the gift was actually for Michelle Obama.
His office announced that the government would set up a process to review the fate of remaining political prisoners by the end of the year, allow international human rights organizations more access to prisons and conflict zones and take “decisive action” to stop violence against the country’s minority Muslim population.
“Oh thank you,” Mr. Obama said. “Michelle, my wife,” would “appreciate it.”
More than 200 political prisoners remain in custody, and the government has waged a brutal campaign against insurgents in Kachin State. Human Rights Watch said Sunday that satellite imagery showed violence, arson and extensive destruction of homes in Rohingya Muslim areas in Arakan State by ethnic Arakans in October, which it said was carried out with support of state security forces and local government officials.
“She’ll look very good in that color, Mr. President,” Mrs. Clinton offered.
John Sifton of Human Rights Watch said that if the promises Mr. Thein Sein announced Monday were kept, it would “be a huge step in the right direction for the people” and future of Myanmar, although he maintained it could have been achieved without rewarding the government with a presidential visit so soon.
Thick in the air, if largely unspoken, was the question of Mrs. Clinton’s future. When the president and secretary went to the Wat Pho Royal Monastery in Bangkok to look at the famed Reclining Buddha, they were greeted by a monk whose first words were to wish the president good luck in resolving the “fiscal cliff” back home. Mr. Obama told him he could use the monk’s prayers.
During a stop in Thailand on Sunday, Mr. Obama defended his decision to travel to Myanmar. “This is not an endorsement of the Burmese government,” he said. “This is an acknowledgment that there is a process under way inside that country that even a year and a half, two years ago, nobody foresaw.”
Even the Thais were wondering about Mrs. Clinton’s plans. According to the Thai newspaper The Nation, the monk told Mr. Obama that the statue was a symbol of success and would bring him a third term were he allowed to run. The newspaper reported that Mr. Obama pointed to Mrs. Clinton and said she would be the next president.
He added: “I don’t think anybody’s under any illusion that Burma’s arrived, that they’re where they need to be. On the other hand, if we waited to engage until they achieved a perfect democracy, my suspicion is we’d be waiting an awful long time.”
Aides to both said they did not hear such an exchange and denied that it had happened that way. A recording of the exchange captured by a television boom mike was hard to discern; it is possible the monk was the one to forecast Mrs. Clinton’s future if indeed it had come up.
Myanmar was the second stop on Mr. Obama’s three-country swing through Southeast Asia. He spent Sunday in Bangkok, visiting America’s oldest ally in the region, and headed from here to Cambodia for summit meetings with leaders from throughout the region. It will also be the first time an American president has visited that country, but there are few of the same stirrings of reform in Cambodia, which is dominated by Prime Minister Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge commander.
But at the very least the story underscored the intense interest in the relationship between president and potential would-be president as the band reaches the last stop on the last tour.
The embrace of Myanmar fits into a larger effort by the Obama administration to reorient American foreign policy more toward Asia and to engage the countries on China’s periphery at a time of nervousness in the region about Beijing’s increasing assertiveness. Myanmar was for years locked solidly in China’s orbit, but its move toward the West in the last two years has been driven at least partly by resentment of Beijing’s rapacious exploitation of natural resources here.
For Mr. Obama, it also represents one of the few relatively unvarnished success stories in the democratic movement that he can point to during his time in office. By contrast, the Arab Spring revolutions in the Middle East have now become bogged down in more ambiguous outcomes, as in Libya, where Islamic extremists attacked a United States diplomatic mission in Benghazi in September, killing the ambassador and three other Americans.
None of that anti-American sentiment was on display here Monday. By the time he left six hours later, the crowds had begun to thin and the country began to look ahead to a future that has yet to be written.
